Paralyzed Man Regains Feeling in Legs

An edgy report from Poland of a man, paralyzed for years, who regained sensation in his legs after a nerve-regeneration treatment arouses both hope and concern. The story is written by Benedict Carey for The New York Times. The patient and subject of the story is a 40-year-old man whose spinal column was cut almost in half in a knife attack. He has been paralyzed from the chest down for several years.

His medical team, led by Polish and English doctors, removed an olfactory bulb from behind his nasal cavity. According to Carey, olfactory bulbs are rich in cells that support nerves. Doctors cultured these cells in the laboratory and then injected them in the patient’s body at the site of the spinal injury. They also grafted tissue from the patent’s ankle to bridge nerve repair cells from one side of the spinal cut to the other—about a third of an inch, according to Carey.

Five months after receiving the procedure the patient began reporting sensation and could make voluntary movements. The BBC produced a video of the patient in which he is shown standing and holding to the rail of a wooden deck. While the procedure has shown promise in animal studies, the doctors emphasized that their results would “have to be confirmed in a group of patients sustaining similar types of spinal injury.” The case report has been published n the journal Cell Transplantation, according to the Times story.

The Times story notes that Mark Tuszynski, M.D., director of the translational neuroscience unit at the medical school of the University of California, San Diego, points out that the history of spinal cord injuries is filled with false hopes and cures that could not be replicated. He advises that it is inappropriate to draw conclusions from a single patient.